The Oscilloscope for Firmware Engineers
A logic analyzer and an oscilloscope look like they answer the same question — "what happened on this wire" — and firmware engineers who own one tend to reach for it for everything, because a protocol decode is easier to read than a wobbly trace. They are not the same instrument. A logic analyzer's front end does one thing: at every sample instant, compare the voltage to a threshold and emit a 0 or a 1. Everything about how the signal got to that voltage — how fast, how far past it, whether it wobbled on the way — is discarded before the decoder ever sees a bit. An oscilloscope keeps that information. It is not a better logic analyzer; it answers a different class of question, and it is the only instrument in this folder that can.